It was some time after 1 a.m. when I opened my eyes and saw a shadow standing next to the bed. I squinted. The shadow was short, wearing pyjamas and had hair half-flattened from sleep. ‘Thomas?’
He put his hand on the side of my face. His skin was clammy. I shuffled across the bed. ‘You can hop in with me, honey. Can’t you sleep?’
He put his arms around my neck and squirmed in, searching for the cool spot on my pillow to lay his head. The duvet was almost over his nose when he stopped twisting. ‘Did something wake you?’
He rested his head on the top of my arm. ‘Noise.’
I kissed his forehead. ‘It’s probably just the wind in the trees. Try to go back to sleep – it’s still really early.’
I closed my eyes and focused on my own long, slow breaths. It wasn’t long before I felt him become heavier as he succumbed, my arm pinned awkwardly under his head and his body pressed up against mine. I watched his little chest rise and fall and his eyelids flutter with dreams, in the light of Stephen’s old clock radio. At some point, as the dark gave way to the insipid grey of the first shoots of dawn, I must have fallen asleep for real because he was soon shaking me awake.
‘Mummy,’ he hissed. ‘Daytime.’
I reluctantly opened my eyes and felt for his pyjamas. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’
He shook his head.
‘I’ll give you a treat if you do …’
He regarded me for a minute. ‘Okay.’
We tumbled out of bed and into the en-suite bathroom. It was the one room of the house that Stephen hadn’t yet finished renovating – the bath and shower had been replaced but the toilet was still dingy avocado, and the new plasterboard was patiently waiting for its paint. I helped Thomas on to the toilet where he perched, looking at me expectantly. ‘All finished,’ he proclaimed a second later, leaping off in mid-stream.
‘Good work, honey.’ I hastily dabbed at the mess on the tiles as he took off out of the room, back towards the kitchen, where he would wait for me to turn on the Saturday morning cartoons while I made our breakfast.
I sat, hands cradling my coffee, as he spooned porridge into his mouth, eyes agog as a cartoon Peppa Pig schooled him in several different ways to be impertinent to your parents. Whoever wrote the series must have had issues similar to mine, I thought as I loaded the dishwasher. You couldn’t trust Daddy Pig with anything.
A bicycle bell trilled in the driveway. I grimaced. There was only one person I knew who would be riding a bike around at that time of the morning with enough enthusiasm to ring a bell about it – my best friend, Laura. I know all the films tell you that the first thing you should do when you’ve been wronged by a man is down a couple of pink cocktails and bitch about him with your girlfriends before pashing an absurdly attractive stranger. But I was still firmly in If-I’m-not-talking-about-it,-it’s-not-really-happening mode.
She knocked but didn’t wait for us to open the door, sliding her own key into the lock and pushing the door open. ‘Thomas, darling?’
‘Auntie Laura.’ He let out a whoop and barrelled across the floor to her. She stooped to kiss his cheek. A pixie-like little girl appeared from behind her long, Lycra-clad legs, fumbling with the clip on her own purple bike helmet.
‘Lila wanted to come over to play.’ Laura nudged her in Thomas’s direction. ‘Why don’t you show her the blocks you were telling me about the other day?’
Laura had a bag of pastries over one arm and a steely look in her eye as she advanced towards me. I discarded my first impulse to convince her that everything was normal. She had once told me that I had distinctive ‘tells’ when I was trying to pretend nothing was wrong. It was when I didn’t want to admit to her I hadn’t been able to get Thomas to sleep more than two hours in a row for six months, while the rest of our antenatal group seemed to be operating on a perfect schedule. One of those giveaway signs was the jiggling from foot to foot that I knew I’d started as soon as she spotted me.
‘I’ve brought you breakfast. I didn’t ring, because I know you’d tell me not to come. You’re not rude enough to tell me to leave now I’m here.’
She was right. I motioned for her to follow me into the living room, where the kids quickly tipped the contents of Thomas’s toy box out across the floor. Both of us pretended that we could not see a pile of Thomas’s energetic artworks that had fallen across the floor and a teetering stack of washing waiting to be folded in the corner of the room.
‘I don’t know what’s happened.’ She sat, back perfectly straight, on the edge of the sofa and stared at me. ‘I saw Stephen at the supermarket last night, and he introduced me to Alexa McKenzie, that designer person …’ She bit her lip. ‘It was all a bit awkward.’
I cast about for something to stall the conversation while I caught up. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Stephen was introducing Alexa to my friends? Already? But he had not outright admitted that Alexa was his girlfriend. I could not decide whether that made me feel better or not. Generally, he went out of his way to avoid talking to Laura at all. He and her husband, Mark, sometimes worked together and, unless she turned up with him, he usually found an excuse to do something in another part of the house whenever she came to visit me.
I had to avoid her gaze. ‘Yep, for some reason, he’s decided he’d rather be with a young, fit interior designer than with his heavily pregnant, hormonal wife.’ I tried to smile. I wanted to be self-deprecating, but I just sounded bitter. Which, I might add, I was perfectly within my rights to be.
Laura pulled me towards her and kissed my cheek. ‘I am so sorry. I didn’t want to believe it.’
We sat in silence for a minute, watching the kids roll around on the carpet together. Thomas was pushing a toy car around Lila, who was trying to land a plane on it.
‘What is he thinking?’ Laura spluttered at last. Her words were staccato as she bit back her anger to avoid sparking the kids’ attention. ‘You’re about to have this baby and he’s off ladding about with someone who probably doesn’t even do her own laundry. What a selfish, narcissistic …’
She was talking too quickly, as she extended her arms in my direction. One of her deliberately mismatched earrings scratched the side of my face as she hugged me. ‘It’s so unfair. Being a parent is so … optional for them, isn’t it?’
Laura and I had met at our antenatal classes three years before. Five wide-eyed, unsuspecting new mothers had assembled on plastic chairs in a hospital meeting room, where graphic descriptions of how our pelvises would have to move to allow our kids to get out into the world caused at least one of us to faint. Laura, a nurse who had spent years in the emergency department, just rolled her eyes.
Laura had been trying to fall pregnant for six months when she insisted on being sent for IVF. She was only twenty-eight at the time but managed to get Mark to do a sperm test the day after he had suffered a particularly high fever. It meant he had no swimmers to show for it, and the doctors bumped her to the front of the queue. She was pregnant with Lila after the first round.
Laura impressed me in class with her immaculate wardrobe and always-done make-up, the kind of clothes I would much rather have been rocking as I bumbled around in maternity jeans and oversized shirts. But it was not until Laura and I locked eyes, trying to quell a giggle when an instructor told us she had been qualified at the National Institute of Baby Massage, that we became friends.
‘I’ll cry mascara on your top.’ I pulled back from her. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a mess.’ I twisted a strand of oily hair around my index finger. I couldn’t